


Ice and Traumatized Princes

by The_Ace_Anon



Series: self-indulgent ahit/apop au [3]
Category: A Hat in Time (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Original Character(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:14:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27606791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Ace_Anon/pseuds/The_Ace_Anon
Summary: It's cold. It's cold and there's ice and there's snow and the wind hurts and her voice hurts and he can feel her hands digging into his skin and he can feel the chains around his wrists, and he can't stop crying.(a VERY self indulgent au made by me and my friend (Darkwarfy on tumblr) where we combined my comfort character and his ocs)
Relationships: The Prince & The Florist, The Prince (A Hat in Time) & Original Character(s), The Prince/Queen Vanessa (A Hat in Time)
Series: self-indulgent ahit/apop au [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2019415
Kudos: 8





	Ice and Traumatized Princes

He’s cold.

The ground is littered with snow, the frozen whiteness rising above his ankles, the trees are covered with ice and sleat, his breath is freezing in front of his face, and he’s cold. He can’t stop shaking, whether from fear or ice he does not know, and the icy air stings his throat, digging into his lungs. He shouldn’t be cold, his fire should be keeping him warm, should be fighting off the frost and the snow, but the fire in his chest feels dull and dead and the ice keeps digging deeper and deeper. He forces himself to start moving, one step after another, knowing that the longer he stays still the quicker he’ll freeze. The cold seems to worsen with the movement, the snow making it harder and harder to raise his feet with each step, the wind howling in his ears, and-

“ **My prince** ?” And he stops, that’s not wind. He scrambles to make a run for it, but the snow grows deeper and the wind fights his movements and he trips, falling into freezing white. Gasping and shaking and freezing, he tries to push himself up but a cold hand grabs his wrist and yanks him upright.

“ **There you are** .” The hand tears into his skin, spilling blood onto the white snow, and it takes all he has not to scream. “ **Why did you leave** ?” Frost begins to spread on his skin, freezing his blood before it can continue to spill, spreading up his arm and towards his face. “ **I thought you loved me** .” He tries to push the hand off, to get away, to do something, but her grip tightens and his legs refuse to move.

“P-please-please stop-” He stutters, tears dripping from his eyes and freezing on his skin. 

A pause, and then “ **Why should I** ?” And the ice starts to spread. It starts at his fingertips, slowly traveling up his arm, reducing his muscles and bones and blood and  _ flesh _ to nothing but ice and frost. This time he  _ does _ scream, his voice echoing through the frozen wasteland. He struggles more, trying desperately to get away from the pain and the ice and the  _ cold _ but his legs are frozen and dead and his arm is frozen over and she refuses to let go.

“ **This wouldn’t be happening if you had just stayed**.” He can’t breathe, the ice freezing over his lungs and chest. He tries to summon his fire, to melt it all, to make it go _away_ , but his fire doesn’t respond, only lets itself be frozen over, and he still can’t _breathe_ \- “ **This is your own fault, you know**.” It's worked its way up to his face now, covering his mouth, his frozen tears, his hair, his eyes, covering his body in nothing but cold col **d cold** ** _cold_** ** _  
_****_  
_** “ **You deserve this**.”

  
  


Thea jerks awake, gasping for air, tears forming in his eyes, the echoes of a scream still in his throat. He’s still cold, can still feel the suffocating ice, and his fire roars to life, ready to fight it back. But he’s still  _ cold _ and he can still feel the ice and he can still feel  _ her _ holding onto him and he still  _ can’t breathe- _ and then someone hugs him. He hugs them back, sobs racking through his body, tears dripping out onto their shoulder, the fire at his fingertips dying down as their whispered reasurences reach him.

“It’s alright, you're safe.” Camilla mutters, rubbing his back. “She’s not here, she can’t hurt you, you're safe, ok?” He holds her tighter, gripping onto her clothes. But despite the words he can still feel  _ her _ , feel  _ her _ cold and  _ her _ ice, threatening to overtake him again, to drag him back to the snow and the wind and  _ her _ voice, back to the chains and the hunger and the cold. “Thea?” Cam’s voice sounds distant and he tries to focus on her and not the wind and the snow and the ice but they won’t let go,  _ she  _ won’t let go,  _ she  _ keeps pushing  _ her _ self to the forefront of his mind and memories and reality and he knows any moment Cam’s going to be dead, blood-coated ice sticking out of her chest and her eyes faded and glassy, and  _ she’s _ going to drag him back down to that room with the chains and the ice and the  _ cold _ -

“It’s cold.” Is all he manages to get out. He shouldn’t be, with the blankets and the fire in his chest and Cam holding him the cold should be nothing but a distant memory, but he can’t stop shaking and the ice is still in the back of his mind and he _hates it_. Someone places another layer of blankets on him, another puts more wood in the fireplace, making the fire roar and spark, and a third sits next to him on the bed, a comforting hand on his back. Thea blinks open his eyes and tiredly watches all this unfold, and a sudden sting of guilt forms in his chest when he realizes he just woke everyone up again at some ungodly hour for the _fifth night in a row-_ __  
__  
“I’m sorry.” He pulls out of Cam’s hug, holding the blankets around him tighter instead.

“Hey, no, don’t apologize.” Cam says, forcing him to look her in the eyes. “This isn’t your fault, ok? There’s no reason for you to be sorry.” He wants to argue, it feels like his fault, after all if he wasn’t here none of them would be awake and worried, but he’s too tired and can’t work up the energy for anything more than a nod. Now that the panic of the nightmare and the cold has worn off, he can feel exhaustion bleeding into his body, begging him to sleep. Not that he will, not with ice threatening to overtake him everytime he dares to close his eyes.

He gives Cam a small smile. “I’m ok now, you should go back to sleep.” Cam gives him that look of ‘Please we both know you’re not ok’ and opens her mouth to protest when the person next to him interjects.

“He’s right you know, you look exhausted. You should go to sleep, I’ll stay here with him.” Logan says, hand still on Thea’s back. The bed dips as Debrah sits next to him too and the prince notices Derek leaning against a nearby wall, concern apparent in his eyes. 

Cam looks between the three of them before sighing. “Just promise you won’t insult him too much?” She says, standing and stretching.

“Wha- I’m not going to insult him! Honestly, who do you think I am?”

Cam ignores his retort. “Come get me if you need anything, ok?” He gives her a small nod and, with one last concerned look, Cam leaves the room.

“You two should go too, it’s time for our nightly ‘traumatized princes’ club meeting.” Thea cracks a small smile at that.

Derek, despite his worry, smiles and raises an eyebrow. “Don’t I get to be at that meeting?”

“Come back when you’ve almost died.”

Deb raises her hand. “I almost died once.”

“You’re not a prince?!”

“I’m close enough.”

“No you’re not!”

“I am too, take away the Ss and princess is literally just prince.”

“That’s not how words work. But seriously, I got this. You two should get some more sleep, you stayed up with him for the last few nights, it’s my turn.” Thea feels another stab of guilt that he wakes up everyone often enough for there to be turns watching him, but he doesn’t voice it and instead just watches as the other two concede and leave them to their ‘traumatized princes’ club meeting. Logan stays seated next to him and rubs his back a bit more, opting to be a comforting presence until Thea makes it clear he wants to talk. He lets the silence sit, enjoying the comfy darkness, until slowly the quiet becomes too much and he swears he can hear wind and the crunching of ice in the back of his mind.

“Maybe I deserved it.” Thea says, breaking the quiet and pushing back the wind and the ice.

“What?”

“Being chained up, …..I really upset her, and If I’d been better and made it clearer how much I loved her maybe she wouldn’t have felt the need to lock me up. Maybe I deserved it”

“Well that sounds like bullshit to me. Just because you ‘upset’ her doesn’t mean it was ok for her to lock you up, you made it clear that you loved her, it’s her own fault for not seeing that.”

“.....she said she was doing it because she loved me.”

“If she really loved you, she would’ve had an actual conversation with you instead of just fucking locking you up in the cellar and calling it a day. What she did wasn’t love.”

“......people keep saying that, that if...Vanessa really loved me she wouldn’t have locked me up. But it felt like love….before the cellar. So maybe….it’s my fault that she stopped loving me.”

Logan scoffed. “It’s not your fault she ‘stopped loving you’. She treated you badly before the cellar too, if she had loved you she wouldn’t have tried so hard to change who you are.” He softened a bit. “Listen, I get it's really hard to accept that she hurt you. But it wasn’t your fault, you didn’t deserve any of it. Even if she really did love you and just had a really fucked up way of showing it, what she did to you was wrong. Doing something ‘out of love’ doesn’t make it right.”

“........Ok” He muttered, too tired to push the conversation any further. It was tempting to just let the room fall into silence again, but he could still feel the ice in the back of his mind, still feel the ghost of hands and chains on his wrists, and he didn’t want to be left alone with his thoughts and memories and the ice. “……..Can you….talk about something?”

“About what?”

“Anything.”

“Uh, well….I started working on a new invention a few days ago-” Thea listened to him ramble about his work, nodding or making comments when needed. After a while, his exhaustion began to overtake him again and the other prince’s voice faded away. His eyes began to drift closed, and each attempt to open them only got harder and harder until finally they refused to open. He let himself doze off a bit, comfortable in the warmth and not-quite silence and he felt his head drop and-

“.....hm?” Thea cracked his eyes open, waking up slightly as someone moved him. His head had somehow made its way onto Logan’s shoulder, and now he was being moved down onto the bed. His head hit the pillow and he muttered a few unintelligible words into the fabric before letting his eyes close again. He was distantly aware of someone pulling the blankets over him before he finally fell asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Logan, Derek, and Debrah all belong to @Darkwarfy on tumblr, they're from his wip called "A Promise Of Purity".


End file.
